Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Sony Vaios try to make a 'Splash'

Amid the parade of Sony products announced this morning, it might be easy to get lost in the crowd--unless you happen to be clad in floral patterns of bright pink and blue. That's how Sony's Vaio laptops tried to stand apart, anyway, in the latest iteration of its "Graphic Splash Expression Collection." Despite the ornate names of the newest crop--which include "Victorian Lace" and "Flora"--it's actually quite subdued compared with earlier releases that boasted leopard prints and giant polka dots.

The patterns and colors can be mixed and matched, and personal engraving is free for the 1,200 laptops in this limited edition. But perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is under the hood: The keyboards can be customized with three new designer fonts. Other than that, the 15.4-inch widescreen laptops have the usual run of Vaio specs and options.

The patterns and colors can be mixed and matched, and personal engraving is free for the 1,200 laptops in this limited edition. But perhaps its most distinguishing aspect is under the hood: The keyboards can be customized with three new designer fonts. Other than that, the 15.4-inch widescreen laptops have the usual run of Vaio specs and options.


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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Morph concept phone

Morph, a concept cell phone co-developed by Nokia Research Center and the University of Cambridge, is featured in an online display presented in conjunction with "Design and the Elastic Mind," a new exhibition of art-meets-technology advances scheduled to run through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Morph is intended to demonstrate how nanotechnology might be used to make mobile devices stretchable, flexible, transparent, and easier to keep clean.


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One objective of the Morph project, says Tapani Ryhanen, head of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge U.K. lab, is that its "combination of art and science will showcase the potential of nanoscience to a wider audience."


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Travel Without the Laptop, Carry Your Computer on a USB Drive

Laptop computers are shedding weight but they still weigh a few pounds and carrying them around on the shoulders is often very inconvenient.

Do you really need that notebook wherever you go? Not always.

For instance, you are traveling for a business conference or an Internet cafĂ© or a friend’s place that will definitely have spare computers but you need to carry the laptop just because it contains all your software programs, application settings and personal data (like docs, photos, music, videos, etc).

Are you are in a similar situation? If yes, it’s time to give your shoulders some rest – leave that laptop at home and just switch to a USB Flash Drive (or an iPod or any other removable disk).

We generally use USB drives to transfer documents and presentations across computers but these key chains can also be used for carrying software programs and other files. Here are some resources to help your turn that USB drive into a personal computer.

portable-apps-softwarePortableApps – This is a excellent collection of useful programs like Firefox (for web browsing), OpenOffice (like Microsoft Office), Pidgin (for chat) and GIMP (for photo editing) designed to run from any removable disk without installation. PortableApps also includes VLC Media Player that can virtually play all multimedia file formats.

Do checkout some other wonderful sites like portablefreeware.com and tinyapps.org for downloading apps that can run off your USB drive.


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How Pakistan knocked YouTube offline (and how to make sure it never happens again)

This graph that network-monitoring firm Keynote Systems provided to us shows the worldwide availability of YouTube.com dropping dramatically from 100 percent to 0 percent for over an hour. It didn't recover completely until two hours had elapsed.

A high-profile incident this weekend in which Pakistan's state-owned telecommunications company managed to cut YouTube off the global Web highlights a long-standing security weakness in the way the Internet is managed.

After receiving a censorship order from the telecommunications ministry directing that YouTube.com be blocked, Pakistan Telecom went even further. By accident or design, the company broadcast instructions worldwide claiming to be the legitimate destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube's range of Internet addresses.

The security weakness lies in why those false instructions, which took YouTube offline for two hours on Sunday, were believed by routers around the globe. That's because Hong Kong-based PCCW, which provides the Internet link to Pakistan Telecom, did not stop the misleading broadcast--which is what most large providers in the United States and Europe do.


This is not a new problem. A network provider
in Turkey once pretended to be the entire Internet, snarling traffic and
making many Web sites unreachable. Con Edison accidentally hijacked
the Internet addresses for Panix customers including Martha Stuart Living Omnimedia
and the New York Daily News. Problems with errant broadcasts go
back as far as 1997.


It's also not an infrequent problem. An automatically-updated list of suspicious broadcasts created by Josh Karlin of the University of New Mexico shows apparent mischief--in the form of dubious claims to be the true destination for certain Internet addresses--taking place on an hourly basis.

So why hasn't anyone done something about it? False broadcasts can amount to a denial-of-service attack and, if done with malicious intent, can send unsuspecting users to a fake bank, merchant, or credit card site.

To understand why this is both a serious Internet vulnerability and also difficult to fix requires delving into the technical details a little.


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Monday, February 25, 2008

UltraExplorer is nearly perfect...

There are several good freeware file-browsing alternatives out there. In the past, we've written about both free and shareware alternatives such as 2xExplorer Z1, Xplorer2 Lite, and others. However, none of them come close to the voluminous feature set of UltraExplorer

UltraExplorer combines customization and a wide range of useful features.

UltraExplorer overhauls the file-browsing experience. Many things will seem similar, yet several key features have radically different work flows from the Microsoft file navigator. It also combines the best aspects of Windows Vista's explorer with those from XP, and then throws in a few spices of its own to come up with a delicious meal of file management.

The tricky thing about describing the UltraExplorer interface is that it's entirely customizable, from the Toolbar menu to the icons, tools, and options that live below. You can permanently hide any of the 17 toolbars and nine windows that come with the program, so you never have to deal with more clutter than is absolutely necessary.

Two of the most useful toolbars are the address bar, standard in Windows Explorer for XP, and the breadcrumb bar, standard in the Vista version. Here, you can use one or the other or both, and even choose to have drop-down navigation included with the breadcrumb bar. Being able to easily access the absolute location of a file is important for me when sending files to co-workers or uploading images, but being able to easily go up three folders is important, too.

UltraExplorer's address bar and breadcrumb bar.

(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)

The Favorites section can live as a left-navigation window or as a toolbar, and both files and folders can be added with a simple drag and drop. Each window contains its own mininavigation for maximizing and minimizing, and its own toolbar for enacting changes without having to figure out where the tool controls are in the main toolbar. In Favorites, by clicking on the ABC button you can edit the otherwise locked lists.

Staying with the navigation windows for the moment, one great innovation in UltraExplorer is the Drop Stack. This is a scratch pad, a secondary clipboard, for quick editing. For example, if you know you want to move a folder somewhere, but you haven't decided where, drag and drop it on the Drop Stack and drag it back over to the file tree when you've figured where it's going to live. Of course, if the work flow for using the Drop Stack doesn't make any sense to you, hide the window and you never have to see it again.

The basic Windows Explorer interface, for comparison.


I prefer the Details view when I'm file navigating, although setting the permanent view can be a bit hard to find. Under Tools/Options/Listview, there's a choice in the middle of the options to set the Default View. It might be hard to find because most of the Options menu is laid out with check boxes, not drop-down menus, and is indicative of one of the minor flaws in the program. The entire Options menu needs an overhaul: most menus start off with the most generic at the top and the more specific choices at the bottom, but UltraExplorer uses the opposite methodology.

For those who don't like the Details view--understandably so, too, as it's the OCD of file viewing options--this program has a neat surprise for you icon viewers. The Action toolbar has a tool called Stretch. It appears as a slider tool, and is used to quickly and smoothly magnify and shrink your icons. Next to it lives the Quick Thumbs tool, so if you don't like a standard icon view, but need to examine the very pores of your icons, you can easily switch over with Quick Thumbs, Stretch as need be, and then jump back before anybody realizes you were using the decidedly unedgy icons.

UltraExplorer also has a dual pane view, allowing users to view two file trees simultaneously. This FTP-style view features the same level of customization that your main view possesses. You can have different view settings, transfer files from folder to folder as you would in an FTP client, and link the scrolling mechanism. Two other minor but useful features include tabbed navigation, so you don't need to use the dual view to have multiple file trees going, and user-defined mouse gestures.

Get FTP-style file browsing with UltraExplorer's dual view.


There is very little in this program that can't be user defined, from hot keys to displayed folder size to themes--it comes with eleven. There's a built-in external program launcher, and UltraExplorer supports most Total Commander plug-ins, not only making it extensible but giving it the power to be positioned as your main go-to program.

All this makes a good argument for UltraExplorer being the best file manager out there, but it's not a no-brainer. Two major flaws hold the program back: the file searching sucks, and UltraExplorer doesn't auto-replace Windows Explorer.

The built-in filter only indexes the folder you're looking at, not your entire hard drive, which makes it shockingly difficult to search more than one folder. I like the concept behind the filter, where users can create savable searches, but the single-folder limitation is a major drawback. UltraExplorer features a fast installation and runs on about 20MB of RAM, but I'd be willing to sacrifice some of that for an drive-wide indexing.

By not automatically replacing Windows Explorer, or at least having an option for that, UltraExplorer will be forever competing against Microsoft's native file manager. You can activate a hot key under Tools/Shell Extensions/Win-E Hook--hit the Windows key on your keyboard with the E key--that will open the program, but it's an imperfect solution. Half the time it opens Windows Explorer with UltraExplorer, and it doesn't really address the fact that other programs still recognize the default navigator as the primary program.

The creator of UltraExplorer has indicated that he's rewriting the entire code for the program, so hopefully these features will be included in the near future. Until then, UltraExplorer remains a very good, but not absolutely necessary, replacement.


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CompactFlash revamp aimed at cameras

A speed-boosting overhaul of CompactFlash memory technology could start arriving in cameras next year, but it's incompatible with the version used in today's higher-end models

The new version, called CFast, has faster data-transfer speeds that could let photographers take more continuous shots without waiting for the camera to catch up, cut camera makers' costs for built-in buffer memory, and make it swifter to review photos on a camera or copy them to a computer.

"It's going to end up in the high-end cameras. The reason to move to it is purely for speed," said John Santoro, senior product marketing manager for Lexar, a flash card maker and Micron subsidiary. He predicts its arrival in 18 to 24 months. "It's my feeling the camera companies already have this on their road maps and want to start working on prototype samples as soon as the specification is finalized."

But as with many upgrades, the standard will break compatibility with today's technology. That means today's CompactFlash cards won't work in CFast slots, and CFast cards won't work in today's slots.

So the more certain you are that you'll buy a new high-end camera in the next couple years, the more cautious you should be before investing in an expensive collection of shiny new 32GB CompactFlash cards.



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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Is that a rock or a man on Mars?

Pictures of Big Foot, the Loch Ness monster, and the Face on Mars may have new company. A blowup section of an image from the Mars rover Spirit shows what looks like a person perched atop a rock on Mars. The image, shown here, was grabbed from panoramic images taken by Spirit November 6-9, 2007.

January 25 update: In an e-mail, a NASA spokesman said that the "man" on Mars is actually "a 2-inch sedimentary rock that has been eroded by the wind."


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Firefox crosses 500 million download mark

Sometime last night, Firefox downloads crossed the 500 million threshold.

Mozilla congratulated itself on attaining 500 million downloads of the Firefox Web browser.

(Credit: Mozilla)

It's an arbitrary but interesting milestone for the open-source Web browser, whose development is overseen by Mozilla but that's also developed and extended by a large number of outside programmers. In September 2007, Firefox crossed the 400 million download mark, indicating an average rate a bit shy of 20 million per month at present.

According to the Spread Firefox site, there had been 500,168,448 downloads as of 6:15 a.m. PST. About 12 hours earlier, there had been more than 499,900,000.

Firefox has spread widely in the years since its release. The project originally was named Phoenix to symbolize a rising from the ashes of the Netscape open-source browser project that began in 1998 but languished for many years as Microsoft's Internet Explorer solidified its lead.

Now Firefox programmers are working on version 3, which brings performance improvements and interface changes, and Mozilla also is working on a mobile version of the browser for handheld devices.

A sister subsidiary of Mozilla, Mozilla Messaging, is working to reproduce the successes of Firefox with the open-source Thunderbird e-mail software.


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Friday, February 22, 2008

Lenovo ThinkPad X300

Product summary

Thanks to its superior feature set, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 just might outshine the Apple MacBook Air.


Specifications

Manufacturer: Lenovo

Processor:

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.2 GHz

RAM

Installed Size
2.0 GB

Storage

Hard Drive
64 GB
Hard drive type
Solid state

Operating System / Software

OS Provided
Windows XP Professional


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Amazing Plane...


Do u believe that its a plane???


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